During some telephone conversations a talker can hear a delayed copy of the talker's own voice emanating from the telephone receiver. This phenomenon is known as talker echo. Talker echo is caused by signal reflections in the telephone network and acoustics. Echo becomes increasingly annoying to the talker as the echo increases either in volume or delay relative to the talker's speech.
When an electrical wave travels down a wire, the electrical energy can be reflected back if there is a change in impedance at any point in the transmission path. In the analog portion of a telephone network this impedance mismatch occurs most significantly at the hybrid that does a 4-wire to 2-wire conversion. If the impedances are well matched very little signal is reflected. However, when there is a large impedance mismatch, most of the signal can be reflected. This reflection at the hybrid is referred to as “Hybrid Echo”.
Echo cancellers are used in the telephone network to remove (cancel) these reflections (echo) to as great a degree as possible. Much of this cancellation requires the echo canceller to compare an outgoing signal, which may contain a talker's speech signals and/or noise signals, to an incoming signal. The incoming signal may at times contain noise signals, an echo of the “outgoing” talker's speech signal and/or a speech signal from a second “incoming” talker.
For an echo canceller to function properly, it needs to be able to determine if the incoming signal contains speech from a local source (near-end speech) or the echo of an outgoing signal. This determination is often referred to as “double talk” detection. A common method for double-talk detection is to compare the outgoing signal to the incoming signal. The louder the volume of the echo with respect to the volume of the outgoing signal, the more difficult this determination becomes.
The ratio of the power of the echo to the power of the outgoing signal is referred to as the echo return loss (ERL). The ERL is equal to the amount of power that is lost from the transmitted signal when the signal is echoed back. ERL is said to be “lower” when the returning echo is close to the same volume of the outgoing signal. The ERL is “higher” when the echo returns at a more reduced volume. Without echo cancellation in the telephone network, telephone calls with low ERLs have more audible echo than calls with high ERLs.
In network configurations where the ERL is low (i.e., the echo is louder) for some calls, attenuation can be put into the echo path to make the ERL higher. A problem with such an approach is that for the attenuation to affect the echo, it also must affect the volume of at least one of the two voice paths. Further, the addition of such attenuation is then present even in calls where the ERL is already high. That is, the attenuation is usually static or fixed and does not change based on actual call conditions.
Automatic gain control (AGC) methods have also existed where the power level of a signal is monitored to ensure that a desired signal level is maintained. This approach generally cannot be used in a voice system as voice power levels are very inconsistent. In addition, AGC methods are concerned only with maintaining a power level, not with avoiding low ERLs.